Life is Short and Desire Endless by Patrick Lapeyre

The novel is not without wicked humour, and most of this comes from Blériot’s frantic efforts to keep both his unhappy marriage and his turbulent affair–which is not grounded in reality–afloat.
-His Futile Preoccupations

This delicious novel revolves around a classic love triangle: two men and one woman. She is English, they are French and American. The Frenchman is married, the American is not. None of this makes any difference. The woman—elusive, unreliable, a classic femme fatale—flits back and forth between her two lovers, driving them both mad. Lapeyre’s subtle, graceful, yet compulsively readable narrative shows us the folly of men who fall helplessly in love with women they don’t understand. Its theme is universal and its humor is sly. It is the perfect introduction in English to this brilliant writer’s work.

Patrick Lapeyre is the author of six acclaimed novels, all published by Éditions P.O.L, including L'Homme-soeur, which was awarded the Prix du Livre Inter in 2004. Life Is Short and Desire Endless was also nominated for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Renaudot. Adriana Hunter studied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than forty books including Enough About Love by Hervé Le Tellier (Other Press) and has been short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize twice. She lives in Norfolk, England.

On the Seawall

Reviewed by Ron Slate
on
Aug 30 2012

...infects the reader with la maladie -- though sometimes it seems that Lapeyre lets the bland fever go on too long. He wants the surface to be as attractive as cinema while disavowing the narrative’s old tendency toward depth.